Martin Simpson - Vagrant Stanzas

I am really a rock music fan. If you browse my CD collection, it is mostly rock. Planet Rock is permanently tuned into my digital radio. However, I have a quieter side too, and that betrays an admiration for folk music. By no means all folk music, however. I find some of it excruciating. But when it's good, it's hard to beat.

A few years ago I went to a gig called the Four Martins. It was a guitar playing evening, 4 guys called Martin each with a distinctive style, and it was very enjoyable. And the best of the four to my ears, was Martin Simpson.

Subsequently, I did nothing about following up on this chap, but by chance recently I came across an advert for this album, his latest. I had a quick listen on Spotify and ordered it immediately, in fact the "Deluxe Limited Edition" version, with an extra CD included.

It is Martin Simpson playing a guitar or banjo and singing... that's it. But it sounds fantastic, it's just bliss. To me anyway - my missus thinks it's a bit dreary. Well yes, I see her point, there are very few upbeat songs here, it is all a bit sad... typical of folk music generally I suppose. In fact one track, "Jackie And Murphy" - I defy you not to have a tear in your eye by the end, and an anger of the injustice the story of the song portrays - read the sumptuous sleeve notes to find out more... quite moving.

So the songs are written by Simpson himself, or are arrangements of traditional British and American tunes. The production is unobtrusive but perfect for the music. The guitar playing is superb and the singing... well elsewhere in this blog I review a Kate Rusby album and repeat the cliché that she has the voice of an angel. There's no reason I couldn't use the same phrase to describe Simpson's voice, but it don't sound right, do it? Let's settle for the fact that his voice is just perfect for what he's singing, can't imagine how it could be bettered.

Very highly recommended, 10/10, you could buy it here.

130,000 miles in a diesel Vauxhall Astra H/Mk5

All good things come to an end, and I've finally, after 9½ years, said goodbye to 'the best car I ever had' - my Astra CDTI. 

Okay, well I guess 'best car' is pushing it, as it's certainly not one of the most exciting, but 130,000 (almost) faultless miles, can't be bad.

And, though complete records aren't available, from what I can tell it returned 54mpg when it was new, and it was returning 54mpg to its final day.

And hey, look left, the old girl isn't looking too shabby either... from a distance...

It's been replaced with the Ford Focus that appears in other articles on this blog comparing Astra with Focus, see the first one HERE and the second one HERE. To save you reading them, I'll summarise by saying that though the Focus is okay, it's not as good as the Astra.

But what it is, is younger. 4 years and 60,000 miles younger. And there was a rather alarming list of 'issues' to address in the not too distant future. Time to bail. Good luck to the new owner, you're getting a cracking car.

Here is a brief summary of how that 130,000 miles went: the car arrived late, having been found to have a faulty steering pump during its pre-delivery check, not a good start, but as it turns out not a sign of things to come. We immediately took it on holiday to Scotland, where its virtues emerged rapidly, low fuel consumption, powerful performance and comfort. It then spent a lot of time going from North to South Wales and back again, never giving the slightest trouble for around 80,000 miles over a four year period. I then took it over from the missus when she got a new company car (the Focus). I had to have new brake pads and disks fitted. It did school runs then for the rest of its time with us, plus the odd foray back to the Midlands. Eventually something did go wrong, the alternator failed and I just made it home on battery power. While fixing this it was discovered the water pump was on its way out, so another replacement. And a coil spring broke, and eventually I had new rear shocks, and some front suspension bushes replaced. Other than that it was the original car when I sold it, original clutch, exhaust, turbo, everything. The one thing that was a problem was the aircon. When it worked, it worked well, but during my tenure of the car, it hardly ever did work. I had it pumped up and checked several times, always failed after a month or two. Ah well, the weather has not been that good in recent years!

So, now I'm in the Focus every day, and to be honest I miss the Astra. It went better, had a less harsh ride, and had none of the irritating niggles of the Focus. As the RAF would say "Per ardua ad astra" - if I work hard I'll get another Astra. Ahem. 

Visit DriveArchive to discover the history of this car, and maybe yours too...

Mercedes-Benz SLK R170 (late-mid-life-crisis edition)

So, if you've read any of the other motoring related posts in this blog, you may know that I've had some pretty uninspiring cars in recent times.

It has not always been so, in fact for many years I had something 'interesting'... if not exactly good. But in recent times I have had a series of dull cars, and in fact the last two have been diesels. Ouch.

Last year I started to get very itchy feet about this, and started looking around for a nice ride.

I started my quest  by looking at the obvious choices, MG TFs and MX-5s. But neither inspired me, though especially the Mazda would be a sensible choice. Boxters were too much, and I was struggling. Then a local garage had a Chrysler Crossfire. I quite liked the look of it, but they got such bad reviews. Further reading on them revealed they were based on the Mercedes Benz SLK, which did not get bad reviews. Aha.

I started looking at these cars, and discovered there were loads of them. They varied in price of course, but the cheap ones were pretty cheap. I'd never really noticed them before, but the more I looked, the more I liked. The obvious appeal of the electric roof. They are handsome beasts. They are German built. Hmmmm.

Well, after much looking, I spotted a nice looking one locally, but before going to view it I rang a friend who I knew had had an SLK in the past, to ask what to look for. Turns out he still had his Merc, but it was SORNed. "Come and have a look at it..." I did. Next thing I knew it was in my drive. Love at first sight.

Guilty as charged then, of not looking into the fine print of the car before purchase, not having it professionally checked out, not even looking at it particularly carefully, and certainly not of having thought it through. But what the heck, it was only £2k. I say only... that's quite a lot to me, but it's not a lot for all the stuff I got.

It's a M-B SLK Kompressor 230, 1997 pre face lift R170 model, i.e. the original first 'pure' SLK before they started fiddling with them. Some say destined to be termed a 'classic' in a year or two. 195BHP, 0-60 in 7.5 seconds, top speed over 140mph. 5 speed auto with a supercharger. And a 'Vario' electric roof.

So far, so good. Nothing much to report. Everything works. It's a blast to drive with the roof down, really lovely. I haven't dared fully exploit its performance yet, but you can tell it's all there, under your right foot.

I will write more of my experiences with the car in time. One thing I have learned from hanging around the SLK World forums, is that the car is a complex thing, and I'm pretty lucky that nothing has gone wrong. Yet!

Update - read what has happened over the first two years of ownership, click here.

Acer Aspire One D255 - To Linux and Back Again

Having done sterling work for a year or so, my faithful little Acer Netbook was slowing to a crawl. No blame on the hardware, it's Windows innit? Seven versions in and it STILL needs reinstalling every now and then. Why, for goodness sake? Anyway...

But I'd read a magazine article about how Linux can transform the performance of a netbook, so what the heck, I thought I'd give it a go. Fortunately I'm immortal, so losing a few days from my life won't matter, will it?

Oh, if you want to you can read a post I did a while back about the lil' Acer, here.

So I had a surf around and the wisdom seemed to be that Linux Mint would be a good choice. I experimented by making a bootable Mint DVD and running the netbook off that, just to see what would happen. Well... it mostly worked, but you couldn't tell about speed in that configuration.

The install of Mint went smoothly, and was quite quick, so far so good. But there were problems to come. The webcam wouldn't work with Skype. The microphone wouldn't work at all. Only one speaker worked. But above all, the battery life plummeted. It more or less halved, and the poor little Acer got very hot underneath. Some of these issues I may have been able to resolve given enough time, but to be honest I was put off when frequently the advice on forums was to open up a Terminal window and type stuff in that made no sense. Come on... Linux, are you serious? That's like going back in time to Windows 98... maybe even before. I gave it a day or too, but enough was enough. Admittedly it did indeed seem slightly more sprightly, but not fantastically so. So... back to Windows 7. This was where then 'fun' started.

Now I could bore you with how tricky it was to get Windows 7 back onto this netbook, but instead I'll just say this. Despite being in the computing industry since 1975 I am still amazed at how unutterably crap some programmers are - there is little excuse for the litany of stupid problems I faced trying to do something that should have been easy. I had gone to the trouble and expense of buying a USB DVD drive, and making the restore DVDs as per Acer's instructions, so it should be easy, right?

I'll give you an example - this was after I had spent a lot of time just getting the Acer to the point where I could run the restore. So, I was restoring Windows 7 using the Acer recovery disks. It got stuck on step 37 out of 40 something. There was no way around this, as the twerp who programmed this routine made sure as soon as you swapped out to Windows (which was there, working okay 'underneath'), you were flicked back to his full page recovery program... with just a glimpse of the underlying desktop before you got back. Well duh. Rebooting didn't help, as it just went back to where it was, stuck.

The cure for this, which I thought of myself but dismissed as insane, but then I found another poor sap had achieved and recommended, was to get the task manager up using Ctrl-Alt-Del, and then try to click on that window in the millisecond you had before returning to being stuck. I had to get the mouse just in the right place to be ready to click, then swap and click really fast. It took me 20 minutes, but eventually I managed to kill the recovery process. Looking back I can't believe I sat there and did it, but there was no other way.

In the end I got it back working under Windows 7, and its performance is once more acceptable. This time next year when it starts slowing up again, maybe I'll just bin it!

To conclude then, Linux has failed to win me over, and Windows largely sucks, so one is a bit stuck, isn't one? One thing I might try... forget Linux and newish Windows, how about XP. Ah yes. An operating system I actually quite liked, and that worked. Have you tried Windows 8? Ugh.

Four IT Gripes...

Just to get things off my chest... four IT related gripes, knowing these things just might help you.

Much as I like 1&1 hosting - unlike Fasthosts I've never had ANY trouble with them at all - I do find their documentation and Help service is a little lacking from time to time.

I was recently asked to set up a simple contact form on a web site, and looking throught the 1&1 help files, there was a lengthy explanation of how to use FormMail, a public domain bit of Perl code that would do the job with minimum effort.

Except... having spent quite a lot of time messing about with it, I couldn't get it to work. Much head scratching and searching through help files later, I finally cracked the reason. It wasn't my stupidity or a software glitch, or finger trouble or anything like that - it was simply that the account I was trying to get this working on was the cheapest 'Starter' flavour... and it turns out that it didn't support Perl scripting. Arggghhh. This is made a somewhat obscure shortcoming, you have to delve deep into the hosting features to spot this, and at no point did the documentation about how to implement FormMail mention this. Another hour of my life I'll never get back. (I ended up writing myself a PHP script, the results of which are a lot better, IMHO.)

A few months ago I purchased a Seagate Freeagent Goflex Desk 1TB USB drive, and it has worked well and I'm very happy with it. Part of its appeal at the time I purchased is was that it sits in a cradle that, as Seagate put it is "a unique adapter that lets you upgrade instantly or change the drive’s interface for faster transfer speeds". I.e. you can upgrade from the USB2 I have to the new USB3, with its promise of 10x faster transfer rate.

So... I've recently purchased a new Lenovo laptop (see below) which sports 2 USB3 ports, whoopee. I therefore have a look on t'internet for the USB3 cradle for my drive. They are very hard to track down. I could find a cradle and PC card combo, but I don't want that. Eventually I found one on Amazon, though not sold by Amazon themselves, for 45 quid. Now... I can buy a complete USB3 external hard drive for that much... so I emailed Seagate asking where I could buy them from at a reasonable price (I speculated at about 20 quid). They replied promptly, thus:

"I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you.
You will have to get it from Amazon or through the internet. The reason some or most retailer or distributors might not have it is because the drives that came after are all USB 3.0."

So, polite though that was I think I've just been told to bugger off and not bother them. Not very helpful, and of course that's the last time I'll be buying from Seagate.

As mentioned above, I have purchased a Lenovo laptop recently, which is jolly nice, and I will be writing a review of it once I've been using it for a little while. It's a G580, and cost a very reasonable £400 from PC World.

However, there was, as could be expected, quite a bit of Crapware on it out of the box. (For those not in the know, crapware is software manufacturers stick on their products presumably sponsored by the authors to do so, and it's pretty much always complete... well... crap - or if not exactly crap it's certainly not Free software, it's trial versions mostly).

So, expecting this the first thing I did was uninstall it all... I didn't even run most of it to find out what it was, life is too short.

Having then loaded the machine up with lots of my stuff, I was asked to reboot, and I did, and Windows (8) started updating. Only it failed. It got to 15% and then said there was a problem and gave up, specifically it said "failed configuring windows updates reverting changes". Bit of a worry. And there I was, stuck, cos it just wouldn't do the updates.

I finally tracked down the problem (more lifetime lost never to return) on a Lenovo forum. Turns out that the glitch was caused by one of the bits of crapware. The advice was to go to the crapware and change some settings, but of course I'd uninstalled it!

I finally solved the problem by doing some messing about with the services manager in windows, and finally got through it. But I'm an IT professional who wasn't taking no for an answer.

I wonder how many normal folk out there are sitting in front of Lenovo laptops that will not update vital malarkey in Windows because Lenovo installed crap crapware on their nice new machines?

Bit of an outrage really, but as I said the laptop is (so far) very nice, so maybe I'll just need to move on from this initial setback. Watch this space.

 And finally, I've always been a little bemused by the spam checker incorporated into Gmail. It has frequently dumped perfectly good emails from Google themselves into my Spam folder, which seems extraordinary.

As mentioned above I was writing a contact form for a web site, and in the time honoured way with programmers, I inserted the 'Ipsum lorem' text into my first test. (For those happy individuals who are not programmers, this is a bunch of Latin words that are used as fake input for testing porpoises.) So, I sent the email, and lo, it did not arrive. More head scratching, until I realised it had ended up in my Gmail spam folder. Why? Well it's hard to say, but on investigation there is a Gmail spam rule that states that if the email isn't in the language you are using, then it gets marked as spam. Hmmm. Maybe they ought to introduce a  caveat to that rule to allow Latin?